Author: Amy

A lot of my input lately has been news on Twitter. News which is dominated in a presidential election year with almost nothing other than said election. This means I’ve been getting a lot of Trump shoved in my face, and it’s pretty damn depressing and disgusting. It’s also terrifying.

When he first threw his hat into the ring, everyone laughed… apparently even he didn’t take it seriously. Then the bigots and the rich assholes started coming out of the woodwork to vote for him. If it weren’t for the fact that this farce is potentially going to affect the long-term health and international respect of my country, I would probably have laughed too. It seemed that everyone was laughing at him, except then it became clear that they were laughing with him and didn’t realize it.

Now, suddenly, everyone who isn’t a Trump supporter has realized that he is a threat. He’s the presumptive nominee for the Republican party, they’re doubling down on him after swearing left and right that they’d find someone — anyone — else to be the nominee, and dreams of a contested convention and him running a third-party campaign that spoils the Republican vote have gone up in smoke. So now it’s down to hoping that we can convince the swing voters to select the lesser of two evils, as Hillary taking the Democratic nomination looms on the horizon.

I can’t say I particularly like Hilary. She’s done a lot of stupid, she’s more hawkish than I like, she’s probably a little racist — though nowhere near as bad as Trump — but at the end of the day she still at least makes an effort to change with the expressed desires of the people, she’s worked her ass off to get as far as she has in yet another area of society that’s still overwhelmingly male dominated, and she’s really not all that different from the others in the Democratic party. There in lies my biggest problem with her: I’m liberal and don’t identify with the Democratic party. I believe in social services for the masses, I believe in paying taxes to cover it, and I believe in unions. I don’t feel the Democrats fight for these things like they should, I feel that they take the lazy route of leaving it to others to fight for… But the problem is, no one’s able to come take up the fight when the party is full of corporate backed centralists.

Even knowing the chances are slim, I would still like to see Bernie pull the nomination out from under her with a last-minute upset. It’s looking more and more like the option is going to be vote for her in November, or stand by and pray to whatever deity might listen not to let this country elect Trump. I am seeing more and more a reality where I don’t have a choice but to vote for her. But what’s scary is that there is a vocal sort of shit lord out there that is threatening to just rage quit and not vote in the general if she gets the dem nom. The sexist sort of shit lord who’s twice as hard on Hillary than they are on any man, who would rather burn this country to the ground that see a woman as the commander-in-chief. While I’m not enthusiastic about Hillary, and I’m not terrified of what she’d do to this country.

The other thing that’s scary about Hillary probably getting the nomination is that all those people who were enthusiastic for Bernie, those first time voters, those people who otherwise don’t care about the election, they’re also the same people we need voting for key positions everywhere from city dog catcher to Senator. We see it repeatedly, if we elect a progressive president the masses think everything is magically perfect, that things will change over night. Then when they don’t, these same people don’t bother to go vote in the midterm elections and they don’t bother to go back and vote in the next presidential election. Then where are we? Right back where we started.

We need to see a lot of change in how our elections are run, we need to see a lot of change in how the population is engaged about them, and we need to find a way to actually make it possible to hold politicians accountable when they don’t do what they promised. Right now we have a two-party system where people vote for the lesser of evils because first past the post voting means if they don’t the candidate least in common with their goals can win instead. This makes it hard to replace anyone, because it’s really difficult to convince people to stray from the familiar and the safe. We need to make it possible for the average person to feel safe in considering the third-party candidates. We need to make sure that every qualified and able person can vote.

I stumbled into a conversation with one of my bosses the other day, and he was railing on and on about how we needed to start using a mandatory voting system… and while I didn’t say it (I probably should have), all I could think is, we can’t even make it so that the people who want to vote can reliably do so, how the hell would we be able to set up a system that requires everyone qualified to do so must vote? I can just see how this would be abused: institute the mandatory voting laws, do nothing to change how existing polling systems work, then proceed to slam all the low-income people who couldn’t afford to skip work or wait in line for the whole day with the fines for not voting. But then, he’s a well off white man, so these things might not even occur to him. He’s comfortable enough that he takes yearly week-long vacations out of the country, when his employees only get paid sick leave because the state of California recently started mandating it and the only vacation time we get is unpaid. He’s well off enough that his house being broken into and his stuff stolen multiple times is an inconvenience that requires a security system being installed… where if anyone was desperate enough to steal my stuff, I would probably not be able to afford to replace it. I know he thinks of himself as a liberal, but he’s about as liberal as the standing Democratic party. Which is to say, hardly in anything but title.

I’ll have had DeathKitten.net for 12 years coming up on the 24th of May, and SaturnGirl.net (which is currently set to mirror DeathKitten.net) since December 31st 2000. Over the years I’ve had various projects hanging off subdirectories and subdomains, but the main page on the site has always been intended to be a portfolio. I’ve been horrible about maintaining my efforts on that front, often times going years between updates and leaving things languishing even when broken (the style switcher *cough*), leaving really crappy old pieces of writing that dated back to high school up for everyone to see, and having a bio page that was old as sin.

I’ve found lately that the only writing I do is half-cocked rants on diaspora*, little quips on Twitter that mean nothing and seem to only gather notice when I’ve at-mentioned someone, or my writing for my Star Trek role play game (USS Joshua Norton because shameless plug). Even though the quality was pretty bad, there was a time where I carried around multiple notebooks and an accordion folder full of various fiction writings and random musings. That all seemed to die off after I had my backpack stolen with all my rough drafts and works in progress in it, and I never really sprung back from it.

Recently I had an opportunity come up in my twitter feed that I would have liked to try for. An editor was looking for writers for her site and other projects, because a couple of her existing writers had moved onto bigger things. When I followed up, she asked for writing samples in addition to some personal information… and I absolutely dropped the ball because I didn’t have anything already written that I felt was usable, and the suggested prompts she offered when we’d talked about it failed to resonate with me. It particularly bothered me that none of the prompts got me anywhere, because one of the pieces of advice I kept seeing from various authors and writers I admired seemed to boil down to the same thing: Just write. Don’t wait for the muse, don’t second guess yourself, just get your thoughts down until they’re all out. Once they’re down, you can go back and edit, clean them up, turn them into the finished work you’ll eventually show to others, but you can’t do that until such time as you’ve gotten them written out to start.

I feel like I’ve lost something of myself in not doing this long form writing anymore. I constantly feel like I have things to say, and if someone gives me their attention for any length of time, I’ll start ranting about whatever has me fired up lately — usually politics and the downward spiral it feels like the USA is on right now. But in the end, I feel like this ranting gets me nowhere and it feels like it rings hollow. I’ve never been particularly good at speaking off the top of my head, I’m too crass and hot headed for many people to take me seriously, and I feel very disorganized when speaking aloud. Public speaking is a skill, and it’s an especially difficult one to master without preparation before hand, and since I’m usually stumbling into conversations when I find a willing partner for conversation, I don’t often find myself well prepared.

My goal here is to try to get myself in the habit of writing regularly again. I’m not particular about if I’m writing fiction or non-fiction, I just want to get in the habit of getting words out. I want to get better at sharing my thoughts, and I want to make sure that when I’m expressing myself I am doing so in an articulate manner. To that end, I am aiming to post something on a weekly basis. I suppose if any of you want to help out, if anyone is reading this thing, feel free to ether harass me if you don’t see me posting stuff, or offer me topic suggestions. I really need to figure out this self motivation thing though, so I really hope I can keep myself on task with this.